[comp.os.research] raid downtime fault-tolerance & more ??

eho@cognito.Princeton.EDU (Eric Ho) (08/13/89)

Is there a way to increase the downtime fault-tolerance for RAID ?
I mean if the server that "manages" RAID crashed or got some other hardware
faults (or other software bugs) then the whole thing will be screwed even
though the disk arrays are completely ok.  I mean there ought to be a way to
address this issue especially when the disk array is large which means that
the investment will be large and more people will depend on the disk array and
there're many cases (even in university environments) where this kind of
24-hours uptime (at least as far as accessing user data is concerned) is
critical.  I guess that this sort of things ought to built into Sprite or at
least into the Sprite filesystem.

What is the "average" cost of a RAID now ?  i.e. how many disks one needs to
get in order to set up a RAID ?
--

Eric Ho
Cognitive Science Lab.,		Princeton University
voice = 609-987-2819 (x2987)	email = eho@confidence.princeton.edu
					eho@bogey.princeton.edu
regards.

-eric-